Most undergraduate literature courses begin with a compulsory survey course on the novel. The Nineteenth-Century Novel: A Critical Reader fills a real gap in the market as no other book provides such a comprehensive selection of contemporary and modern essays and reviews on the most important novels of the period.By bringing together a range of material written across two centuries, it offers an insight into the changing reception of realist fiction and a discussion of how complex debates about the meaning and function of realism informed and shaped the kind of fiction that was written in the nineteenth century. The novels discussed are: Northanger Abbey, Jane Eyre, Dombey and Son, Middlemarch, Far From the Madding Crowd, Germinal, Madame Bovary, The Woman in White, The Portrait of a Lady, The Awakening, Dracula, Heart of Darkness.

Preface Introduction PART I: EARLY ESSAYS AND REVIEWS Clara Reeve, The Progress of Romance, Walter Scott, On Romance, Hippolyte Taine, Charles Dickens: son talent et ses œuvres, George Eliot, The Natural History of German Life, George Henry Lewes, Realism in Art: Recent German Fiction, Margaret Oliphant, Sensation Novels, Henry Mansel, Sensation Novels, Walter Pater, The Modern Mind, Friedrich Nietzsche, On Truth and Lying in an Extra-Moral Sense, E.S. Dallas, The Gay Science, Walter Besant, The Art of Fiction, Henry James, The Art of Fiction, Henry James, Novels by Eliot, Hardy and Flaubert, Robert Louis Stevenson, A Humble Remonstrance, Thomas Hardy, The Science of Fiction, Émile Zola, The Experimental Novel, Joseph Conrad, Preface to The Nigger of the Narcissus Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams PART II: MODERN CRITICISM 1 Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey 2 Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre 3 Charles Dickens, Dombey and Son 4 George Eliot, Middlemarch 5 Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd 6 Émile Zola, Germinal 7 Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary: 8 Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White 9 Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady 10 Bram Stoker, Dracula: 11 Kate Chopin, The Awakening: 12 Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness